Atlas Arts

Thomas Joshua Cooper

Born in California Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946) is one of the most celebrated and distinctive landscape photographers working anywhere in the world today. Joshua Cooper is the founding head of photography at the Glasgow School of Art but spends much of his life seeking out the edges of the world. Like artists such as Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton, Joshua Cooper is a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities.

The capturing of any one image can involve days, weeks and months of preparation, arduous travel and considerable efforts to achieve. The locations are found on a map, tracked down and then photographed, each place the subject of a single negative taken with a weighty antique field camera. They are meditative, almost philosophical images, exquisitely printed by the artist in the nineteenth-century manner with layers of silver and gold chloride.